California Dreamin'

Written byKaren Clark Cole

Blink opens a second studio in San Diego

I’m excited to announce that after three years of planning, Blink’s expansion efforts are starting to take shape, beginning with the recent opening of a new office in San Diego on September 1, 2017.

San Diego is the first of several new West Coast offices, and then we will be heading east. While we have focused on slow and steady, organic growth throughout our 17-year history, client and market demands have inspired us to expand our reach to serve our national clients with both the depth of our services and our proximity to their offices.

Our industry has had steady growth over the last two decades, but over the last few years, it has begun moving quickly. Blink needs to grow with the industry in order to remain a leader in the UX world and to serve our clients’ pressing and larger-scale digital needs.

During this time of growth, we will remain committed and dedicated to being a values-driven company, with a deep partnership model as the foundation of our client relationships. Our DNA will always be evidence-driven, even though the industry term “UX” is already becoming outdated. (You’ll see that term fading away from our name as well.)

I am proud and honored that our clients are now asking us to work at the highest levels in their organizations on their all-up digital strategies and more frequently on the roadmaps for their entire organizations as they start to think about User Experience as a way to run their businesses — not just a way to design their products.

Companies are realizing that their customers need an integrated, intuitive user experience, from the marketing or promotional website to ordering online, opening the box, downloading the application, using a company’s product, calling customer service, interacting on social media, and even interacting with that company’s employees at an event. To a customer, it’s all one integrated experience that needs to be designed from start to finish. User Experience has become a business requirement.

While Blink’s core services have always been focused on research and design, with Evidence-driven Design for complex software applications our mainstay, we are now excited to include marketing strategy, marketing website design, and increased front-end development in our services. The main team for our marketing work is now based in San Diego, with an emphasis on serving the Bay Area startup world. In Seattle, we have been focused on exploring the emerging technology space and now have deep expertise in IoT, voice, and VR.

The San Diego team in Balboa Park

Besides our new studio in San Diego (check out the beautiful space, formerly design agency Telepathy) and one opening soon in San Francisco, we are also busy building out a 28,000-square-foot office space in our current waterfront building as our Seattle headquarters. The beautiful studio and lab space will include a community-serving “town hall” event area and six state-of-the-art research labs. One of our labs will be dedicated to emerging technology and will be wired and ready to drive insights into everything from a digital shower to an immersive voice and VR experience. We will also continue to deliver insights for our own design work and for our clients’ products and services.

Stay tuned for more growth updates and information on the open house party for our new Seattle headquarters in early 2018, where you can enjoy the view while being immersed in a high-tech, creative space and meet some of the brightest people in the digital world.

When not serving as CEO of Blink UX, you can find Karen organizing events to inspire young girls or training to become a professional kiteboarder.

When not serving as CEO of Blink UX, you can find me organizing events to inspire young girls or training to become a professional kiteboarder.